Effect of Grain Size and Specimen Dimension on Triaxial Shear Strength Parameters of Coarse Soil

Abstract

The triaxial shear strength of two specimen sizes of poorly-graded gravelly sand mixtures (SF) after removing a portion of the coarse aggregate by method called scalped gradation was investigated. The lower shear strength parameters obtained from small specimens for coarse soils in triaxial testing can lead to uneconomic design. In order to reduce testing costs and utilize more economic designs for coarse soils, small specimens can be used instead of large specimens; in addition, the test results can be corrected. The correlation of the triaxial test results of the two different size specimens was evaluated in this paper.